6 Predictions for the Marketing World in&nbsp2014

The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

It's time, once again, to continue my annual tradition of analyzing my predictions from 2013, and if I score high enough, predicting what will happen in 2014. I use this process because it keeps me honest, and keeps you informed as to my relative levels of accuracy (or failure).

Here's how scoring works:

Spot On (+2) - when a prediction hits the nail on the head and the primary criteria are fulfilled

Partially Accurate (+1) - predictions that are in the area, but are somewhat different than reality

Not Completely Wrong (-1) - those that landed near the truth, but couldn't be called "correct" in any real sense

Off the Mark (-2) - guesses which didn't come close

If the score is positive, I'm at least somewhat good at this, and if it's negative, I'm clearly losing the pulse of the industry. Let's see how I did!

In 2013, I made 10 predictions. They were:

#1: None of the potential threats to Google's domination of search will make even a tiny dent

#2: "Inbound marketing" will be in more titles and job profiles as "SEO" becomes too limiting for many professionals

In early January of 2013, "inbound marketing" was used on 18,965 LinkedIn profiles. 12 months later, it's up to 39,860, a growth rate of 2.1X. Meanwhile, "SEO" was in 716,933 profiles and is now in 1,268,169 profiles, a growth rate of 1.7X. The SimplyHired data shows "inbound marketing" making up ground and nearly catching "SEO" in job listings, but for a spike in "SEO" at the end of the year.

I could be lenient and award myself a point since "inbound marketing" did grow faster than "SEO," but I don't think that captures the spirit. Instead, I'm giving myself a -1 because SEO clearly is not becoming too limiting for most, and is still growing fast (though less quickly than in years past). This is a trend that I might expect to see more of in future years, though. -1 point

#3: More websites will move away from Google Analytics as the only provider of web visitor tracking

The data from Builtwith suggests that this one is right on the mark. Here's Mixpanel, Piwik, Hubspot, and Omniture, and here's Google Analytics (whose growth has stagnated, though it is still clearly more popular than any of the others by a very wide margin). +2 points

#4: Google+ will continue to grow in 2013, but more slowly than in 2012

Technically, this one is true from a growth rate perspective (data via SELand), but from a number of users one, 2013 was actually very similar to 2012, so I'm giving myself -1 point

#5: App store search will remain largely ignored by marketers

Anecdotal data would seem to suggest this has been the case, and that's supported by search trends. There was a slight increase in job postings around "app store marketing," but the volume is so low, it's hard to tell if that's a single company or two putting up a couple jobs and impacting the numbers. Given the extremely low LinkedIn numbers (only 118 profiles list "app store marketing" and 59 list "app store SEO") and the shockingly small amount of blog posts on the topic, I think we can call this one. +2 points

#6: Facebook (and maybe Twitter, too) will make substantive efforts to expose new, meaningful data to brands that let them better track the ROI of both advertising and organic participation

Facebook has continued to add more features and data to their advertising platform and brand pages, but it's hard to call it wholly meaningful. Twitter, however, did introduce more data for their advertisers, expanded the advertising options, and now sends some nice metrics via emails to account holders (regardless of advertising status). However, it's hard to call any of these truly substantive or incredibly meaningful. -1 point

#7: Google will introduce more protocols like the meta keywords for Google News, rel author for publishers, etc.

This one would appear to be dead wrong. After the rel=publisher and rel=prev/next tags, we haven't seen a truly broad-base new expansion in this arena from Google. -2 points

#8: The social media tool market will continue a trend of shrinkage and consolidation

#9: Co-occurrence of brands/websites and keyword terms/phrases will be proven to have an impact on search engine rankings through correlation data, specific experiments, and/or both

The correlation data on this was interesting, but not wholly convincing. Then Google released Hummingbird, and the signs Bill Slawski pointed to in his posts on query refinement/substitution seemed even more prescient. That said, it's hard to say we've proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that co-occurrence impacts rankings. There's been no word from Google themselves (though plenty of hints), though the descriptions of how Hummingbird changes relevancy is a strong point in favor of this data. I wish we'd seen more experiments on this, but since the impact is still at least somewhat unproven, I'm going with -1 point

#10: We'll witness a major transaction (or two) in the inbound marketing field, potentially rivaling the iCrossing acquisition in size and scope

Looking back, I think my predictions were a little conservative. This year, I'm going to go out on a few more limbs and be a bit more specific.

#1: Twitter Will Go Facebook's Route and Create Insights-Style Pages for At Least Some Non-Advertising Accounts

I'd expect to see them start testing this with some verified accounts, possibly for big brand advertisers, and then roll it out more broadly. With Twitter going public, it makes tremendous sense for the social site to encourage greater participation of higher quality amongst their high profile users.

#2: We Will See Google Test Search Results with no External, Organic Listings

As Google continues to get more and more aggressive with things like knowledge graph, visual ads, and instant answers, I suspect we'll see some of the first result sets that have no traditional, external-pointing, organic links whatsoever. Google may keep some links as references to the source they're bringing in, but they won't be in the classic organic results format we've seen from them over the last 15 years.

Side note: This will scare the poop out of many marketers, but it probably (hopefully?) won't expand much beyond the experimental/limited release phase.

The search giant will continue to say that many forms of guest authorship and embeddable content are legitimate and worthy ways of marketing, but they'll take a public stab at removing the value passed by many of the seedier, less editorial forms of these tactics. I'm really looking forward to this, because I think these are some of the last bastions of gray-hat spamminess that make the SEO profession and SEO practices seem less legitimate to business owners of all stripes.

My hope is that when Google does this, they're harsh enough with the algorithmic effects to knock a lot of manipulative sites/pages out of the top rankings, but don't go beyond removal of link value into a penalization realm (since lots of very legitimate sites and businesses have, rightfully, presumed these tactics to be above board and employed them). IMO, making this part of the Penguin series of updates would be too punitive on a lot of sites that don't deserve to rank lower simply for having done this in the past.

#4: One of these 5 Marketing Automation Companies Will Be Purchased in the 9-10 figure $ range: Hubspot, Marketo, Act-On, SilverPop, or Sailthru

Marketing automation is very hot, and analysts are already placing bets on Marketo being a target. I'm betting on one of these five companies because they're at a scale to offer a potential buyer competition with Salesforce and Oracle (who bought ExactTarget & Responsys, respectively).

Content marketing is undeniably hot right now, and companies are making investments at a pace I haven't seen since the social media marketing craze of 2008-2010. Currently, LinkedIn shows:

1,268,195 profiles with "SEO"

2,767,263 profiles with "social media marketing"

81,529 profiles with "content marketing"

I'm predicting that, in percentage growth terms, "content marketing" will have a growth rate of 0.5X or higher more than either of the others. More marketers are going to start using the terminology that's catching on with businesses big and small.

#6: There Will Be More Traffic Sent by Pinterest than Twitter in Q4 2014 (in the US)

Pinterest is an odd one. They haven't been growing user numbers as fast as some in the space expected, but the intensity of sharing is unparalleled, and the growth rates for sharing are, too. For some types of sites (e.g. specific sets of content publishers) Pinterest is #2 behind only Facebook for social traffic referrals.

I'm predicting that in the 4th quarter of next year, heavy consumer use will lead to Pinterest driving more traffic, overall, than Twitter. Now I just have to hope someone produces a report that can help verify that claim.

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That's all for this year's predictions. Please do share your own in the comments below.

The Bing Problem is - we in germany//europe ignore them.
An iPhones are struggeling - android is on a run - they need other options than siri on iOS for europe. It may help them in US, but there I think the problem isn't that big. We really ignore Bing. I sometimes take a look and no, these SERPs just make me think: "seriously???"
They have problems with my language (german) or the engine isn't good.

I still think they kill silverlight & bing & (maybe) XBox

There hope for europe must be the Nokia Lumia - and the Mobile Windows - it getting better last month... (my wife has a WinPhone and I think its a pretty good OS for phones - depends on what to do with it)

App store SEO in 2013 -- I'm not an expert on this topic, but I imagine few companies focus on this directly because they market their specific apps externally with links to them spread on online-advertising campaigns, social-media channels, company websites, PR outreach to app bloggers, and more. Besides, I'm not sure that there is a good way to move apps higher in search results besides just getting more downloads and good app-store reviews -- though I could be wrong? Thoughts, mobile-app specialists?

"We Will See Google Test Search Results with no External, Organic Listings" -- Rand, you meant to say "links" in this headline as per the text in the paragraph, correct? I just wonder why Google would even prioritize such a test or long-term move. Penguin seems to be doing at least a decent job of weeding out bad links, so it seems that links should still be an important factor. I wonder what other possible metrics Google could use since domain authority and page authority likely depend on links in part. Structured and semantic data help Google to understand what a page is about for use in the Knowledge Graph and elsewhere -- but those items, it seems, cannot communicate the "authority" of the page and domain.

Targeting guest posts and embeddable infographics & badges -- I'm not sure why "the seedier, less editorial forms of these tactics" would need to be targeted separately from what Penguin may likely have already done. If I wrote many guests posts with nearly-identical content and had exact-match, anchor-text links in the articles and my author biography, would not Penguin have already "caught" me? If my company had gotten tons of websites to add widgets to their sidebars with anchor-text in the credit, would not Penguin have already caught me. I'm not sure what "seedier" uses of guests posts and embeddable items exist that would not already have been addressed.

Resumes with "content marketing" will grow faster than either "SEO" or "social media marketing" -- I totally agree, for multiple reasons. SEO is really a "collection of best practices in numerous disciplines" -- so I question what companies really want when they want to hire an "SEO person." Do they want technical audits of the website, quality landing pages and conversion optimization, something else? In theory, an SEO person should be good at all of these things.

And I'm not even sure that jobs specific to "social media" will exist in a few years. Social media, like the telephone, is just a communications channel that can be used in the context of any sales or marketing goal (with varying results) -- customer service, lead generation, brand awareness, and more. The question I ask: Is it easier to teach a customer-service expert how to use Facebook, or is it easier to teach someone who knows Facebook how to become an expert in customer service? Clearly, the former. So, I predict a trend that social media will eventually be incorporated into existing job functions.

My own prediction -- Internet backlash? The first time I saw that I was being "remarketed" -- the same PPC ads were following me everywhere -- I was a little freaked out. And I work in online marketing. Take that combined with the fact that more and more people realize that everything they do is being monitored -- by companies as well as by their governments -- and I wonder if people will start to either use the Internet less, or at least use it in a way so make tracking that much harder to do. I'm still a little haunted by a headline I saw last year (though I cannot remember the source): Did Edward Snowden Kill Online Marketing?

- Traction, which can get you into trending lists. This will grow your installs exponentially, consider paid advertising and guest post referrals to boost your app installs in order to get it trending. Apple doesn't tolerate paid promotion, so consider directing advertising to a page outside of the ios store.

I think Internet Backlash is a very real thing. I engage in Remarketing and I understand both its value as a marketing tool and its downside as an online stalker.

A little anecdote: My son just started kindergarten and we all had to say something interesting about ourselves in a sort of get-to-know-you game for the parents.My interesting fact was that "I build those ads that follow you around on the internet." Want to know what happened? In a room full of 50 30-somethings, I got booed!

Another anecdote: I have a client who wanted to reply to Yelp reviews. When I explained that I needed a head shot of him for his profile, his answer was "A head shot of me on the internet is not going to happen in any of the next 1 million millenniums."

People are becoming afraid of/annoyed with the Internet. It is still completely intertwined in our daily life and that will not end. But I think people will begin to pull back and anonymity may creep back in.

ASO (App Store Optimization) is a rapidly growing space... transparently, I'm not sure Rand fully groks that yet. As the founder of an enterprise focused ASO product and tools company, I'm acutely aware of the ugly warts, pains, and the strengths of ASO as a practice and an industry. Suffice it to say, I don't believe growth is our core (or even a side) issue. Mobile is just too huge, and growing too quickly, and apps are at the core of that. If you're an app marketer, you have to care about many, many different channels, and App Store SEO is a big one if you're looking for high-quality, organic installs.

I actually wrote a post on the basics of ASO on the Moz blog last year -- feel free check it out. If you have any questions or comments, do let me know.

Additionally, I just wrote a State of ASO post that might be interesting in case you're wondering how the market is evolving and growing.

I definitely agree that their will be consolidation in the Marketing Automation space.

A marketing colleague just told me that NPR had a report saying that HubSpot was looking to be acquired. I am in the Boston area and have watched HubSpot grow and I would not be surprised if they were a target of Google. Google Ventures is already one their VCs.

If HubSpot is an acquisition candidate, it would be interesting to see who buys them given the Google Ventures interest.

Google + is still has lots of potential but yes author tag or author ship has not proven that much effective. I have seen my competitors using Author ship came up in rankings and sink and My website is on the same place. So Google + hash tag is effective too. +2 for that.

About Info graphics,SEO profile increase and Inbound links generators - A lot increased & are in race. The what 2014 is going to be is Info-graphics year the Web designer are going to raise their salary.

In comparison to Facebook,tweeter Pinterest and Instgram are going to be more profited from 2014. :) happy new year to all :) Keep simple Funda - Earn Learn execute :)

Some interesting predictions for 2014 - let's see if your score for this year is better than last year's!

#2: "Inbound marketing" will be in more titles and job profiles as "SEO" becomes too limiting for many professionals

This is an interesting one. Certainly if we look at Moz and its ecosystem I would have thought that this would be true. But I think that in the "outside world" it might take larger companies a bit more time to adjust to the new-fangled ideas of content or inbound marketing enough to give people jobs in those areas. There are still plenty of luddite companies out there.

I really hope your first prediction (Twitter giving an Insights-esque dashboard) is true. From a marketer's point of view - and at the end of the day that's a rather important point of view because it drives their revenue - its really lacking.

Seeing number three (Google hitting spammy guest posters) come true would be great to see as well - at least if it's implemented so that content that provides real value is recognised as a good thing.

But I am going to disagree with number five. I think SEO has a couple of years of good growth yet in the job market, at least until those laggardly companies grasp what content marketing actually means.

Rand - glad to see that you mentioned Pinterest in your predictions as with a small business it is easy to use and does get traffic flow to my website. Glad I'm on the right track making it a part of my plan.

"#2: We Will See Google Test Search Results with no External, Organic Listings

As Google continues to get more and more aggressive with things like knowledge graph, visual ads, and instant answers, I suspect we'll see some of the first result sets that have no traditional, external-pointing, organic links whatsoever. Google may keep some links as references to the source they're bringing in, but they won't be in the classic organic results format we've seen from them over the last 15 years.

Side note: This will scare the poop out of many marketers, but it probably (hopefully?) won't expand much beyond the experimental/limited release phase."

Agree with this 100%. If not next year..soon. If you don't have a brand, you better get one fast and start building loyal visitors. There are some very exciting start-ups working on tech that will bring some of Google's semantic ability to brands..very cool things in that area.

Interesting comments. I am surprised there were no predictions about authorship and how that will continue to effect the search engines. I also agree that we may see a day where there is no organic listings above the fold when someone conducts a Google search. In some cases, I have already seen it drop to one organic result, usually when it relates to product searches.

Predictions for 2013 were not bad at all as most of them are true if not exactly true! J

As far as the predictions for 2014 is concern, I completely agree with the strong action against guest blogging and links from embeddable infographics. But at the same time, I think that links with branded anchor text might get some discount!!

As far as the Pinterest started passing more referral traffic than twitter, I am no expert but I think this might be true for some specific niches but not as a whole.

Thank you Rand for your predictions for 2014 as I believe this will surely help many people staying away from guest blogging and embedded infographic links!!

Very realistic in deed! Apart from content marketing, "Social Sharing" is going to be another hot service in 2014. I am afraid to mention that this will exceed limits and Google will have to launch another update in future to kill it as well:)

The predictions are really exciting ones Rand!!! What I view is that :
1) Google will shift its focus more towards paid search results.
2) Organic they would modify their algorithms to give the direct results for the user queries.
3) Also the best content would be the winner of all times as Google would be ranking them for reference searches.
4) Social media would see a lot of revamping in terms of insights they provide and they would be moving to more promotion oriented posts.

First of all Rand your prediction for 2013 were not bad and you’ve scored more than average that makes you eligible for predicting 2014 :)

Now #2. Google will definitely experimenting the results with no organic listings and the continuity of paid results depends on the feedback. If there will be a good feedback then it might continue this but limit to commercial queries and keep the traditional Google result to general and informative queries. Now this will give confidence to the ppc that’s what Google want. Marketers due to constant worry of penguin, panda, manual penalty, will going to move on towards PPC. So, PPC will rise and this term will be added more quickly in titles on linkedin and its growth will be double than content marketing and social media marketing.

Guest posting will be definitely discouraged as it is misused and converted to paid linking. I predict there will be manual action against few major guests posting blogs by Google as it took action against link schemes like rap genius. This might be due to commercial anchor texts, etc.

Pinterest will surely become the second social media channel after facebook by many means and there will be a great growth in Linkedin and Google Plus as well and might beat twitter when compare with global figures.

Now I don’t agree with # 5 as I believe “PPC” will grow faster than any other word and social media will grow less than PPC but more than content marketing.

One more of prediction is increase in mobile searches than desktop and other devices. “mobile seo expert” or keyword related to mobile optimization will increase on linkedin.

So I saw #1 and thought of the time when DuckDuckGo made headlines with a record number of searches, thought wow - a Google alternative, used this for 2 weeks and went back to Google. The chances of someone dominating search in this world is very slim - there is more chance of people finding information through different avenues than competition in search.

Similar to YouTube - there has been a lot of hype about the new terms and conditions but no one will leave because they have total market share or as close to it as possible.

These are some good predictions. I'm not sure if Google Analytics will truly go away, but I do think that it might become less relevant as each platform rolls out its own metrics in addition to the third party apps that provide additional social analytics. I also agree that G+ will continue to grow not only with users, but also increase in engagement and interaction. I think we will see more participation in Google Hangouts and Communities which will add to the engagement. http://www.brafton.com/blog/2013-social-media-marketing-trends

Thanks for sharing your predictions which I believe will hold good for this year. The 2 buzzwords for marketing this year would undoubtedly be "Social Media Marketing" and "Content Marketing". For the Social Media, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, all would presumably grow, but I wonder what would be the status of Google Plus this year? Any thoughts on that?

I completely agree that We Will See Google Test Search Results with no External, Organic Listings by the end of 2014 and perhaps even sooner. I would even predict that Bing may test no external or organic listings before Google as personalized Bing search results can show as few as 3 organic listings.

I predict additionally that there will be a duplicant content issue for pictures and design (not only text). So using pictures from stock-photography or using templates in web design will be mildly negative. Not much but a tiny bit. At least Matt Cutts says that Design is one of the most underestimated ranking factors. Maybe this is what he ment next to the responsive design issues.

Now I read this post predictions of 2014 , and the truth is that Rand was right about a lot but do not think that Google Analytics will increasingly less , quite the contrary , I have seen the evolution and increased the need among all online businesses. .... is the # 1 web analytics tool , no doubt.

"if you’re using guest blogging as a way to gain links in 2014, you should probably stop. Why? Because over time it’s become a more and more spammy practice, [...] you’re hanging out with really bad company"

According to Hubspot, companies are increasing their content marketing budgets by almost 60% yearly. I do believe you are going to see many more "content marketers" and less "SEO specialists" as far as resume highlights. This will align with the industry.

That was a nice Monday read for me, Rand. They aren't all so obvious which was nice to see and get us thinking. Will they happen? When? How? Who's going to be the first to write about it when it does?

When it comes to your comment about Guest Posting, I'm confused even more about what content marketers will be able to do then, if you feel LinkedIn profiles will also increase in terms of "Content Marketing" updates.

If Guest Posts and Infographics (which I know you don't really enjoy based on your WBF a couple months ago) will be considered spammy in a potential future Google update, then content marketing becomes even more challenging as to how to distribute content to either build or earn links. Guest posting, I mean good guest posting, is earned and completed through channels of communicating with blog admins or site admins to have content submitted, approved, rejected or edited to match their specific sites goals in publishing relevant and informational content. How could Google determine what is an earned guest post vs someone paying another to have their post placed on a site when a site could have decent, earned Google PR and decent DA/PA according to Moz? Interesting prediction.

Such a useful article for search engine optimization and social media content building. It's true that Pinterest is growing really fast, and becoming more and more popular than Twitter or even Facebook.

I agree that infographics have been reducing the value for users of facebook. If Google doesn't do anything about it, facebook as to do more about it as the experience from life events has changed into content spamming. There needs to be more emphasis on quality.

I think my favorite prediction is #2. We've seen Google increase the number of SERPs that include Knowledge Graph links and other links that bring people to yet another SERP for a different query, subject, or related topic. It would make sense Google would care about pageviews and time on SERP for ad purposes and maximizing revenue.

While it may seem aggressive, I like this prediction, Rand! It may not actually happen until 2015 or '16, but I think the spirit of that prediction is spot on. I'm keeping an eye on this in 2014. :)

Yoy're right. Google already start strategies to reduce authorship from search. Lot of contributors(inducing those who are the gaming with Google algorithm) losing their snippets from search day by day.

1. There will be more number of brands/companies will be joining social media (specially in Asian countries)

As the social media is getting more and more energetic, there are many brands/companies (specially in Asian countries and from various verticals) who will be making their debut on social platforms to provide better customer service and to stay connected with them.

2. Increase in quality content development

Believe it or not, but due to Google's latest algorithms and Hummingbird, there are many marketers who are trying to change their link building tactics and shifting to content development and marketing. People are trying to focus on more meaningful content and and coming up with new ideas, theories, and research work. That's good for the industry. Although we can never beat the numbers of spam content, but surely will witness a nice boost in the quantity of quality content over internet.

Praveen I agree with you. Brands now have to very active on social media platforms like facebook, twitter, pinterest, I have seen many big brands are not really active on social media. Although I can see there is rise in social media activities. Content quality will also be another factor for growth in SERP's.

Exactly they are. But everybody has their first time, and we can't compare every business/company/brand (in developing or less developed countries) with those are in US or other developed countries. These companies have just started learning about the benefits they can get from such activities and are moving in the same direction.

I think SEO will probably start to resemble real life, in that 'who you know' will be more important than what you do. If you can get a very popular blogger for example, to be someone in your immediate blog network that regularly engages and cross promotes across all of your social networks - I think that will count for more in 2014. Just a guess - like social proof on steroids. I'd be interested to see how that turns out impacting guest blogging and the like. Thanks Rand :)

I am little bit confused with your this point "Google Will Publicly Acknowledge Algorithmic Updates Targeting Both Guest Posting and Embeddable Infographics/Badges as Manipulative Linking Practices". What may be the bench mark to target these techniques. How Google will measure these points? I hope 2014 would be betterfor SEOs.

I dont think that 2013 was a bad year for SEOs - but I think 2014 could become more difficult for us. 2012 was harder for SEOs I think, 2013 was just an pretty easy year. Some changes, some algorythm updates - nothing that burns a normal or over optimized domain. Or did I forget something? Nothing happend for my clients here - not heard something from other SEOs and there clients. Just some Google Places Troubles - that was all...

Like your 2014 predictions Rand :) And as for #4, I would think that SAP would buy one of the Inbound Marketing solutions now that Oracle has done it. And there's no doubt that Pinterest is taking over as a natural traffic driving engine.

I shared my ideas about 2014 both seriously (here on Moz) and from a entertained point of view (on State of Digital), so I don't have that much to add, and your previews complement well mine.

Regarding mark-ups like Rel="author" and "Rel="publisher", what surveys say to us is quite interesting: rel="publisher" is more implemented than rel="author". Somehow it is logic, as rel="publisher" is yes-or-yes necessary for having a brand page on G+, while authorship is an option for connecting personal G+ profiles and content on web sites (and, still, many web sites owners don't want to give authorship to their authors for "silly" corporate reasons).

Said that, and there were already many cases of this in 2013, Google is more than able to understand (reasonably) well who is that author of a piece of content, thanks to the "by-line" and crossing references (i.e.: an anchor text like "the post by Rand Fishkin").

What I preview, but it was also announced by Matt Cutts in the last days of 2013, is a cleanse of the authorship snippets in the SERPs, in order to respect the authorship's guidelines:

URLs of pages like listings, products' descriptions, home page, institutional... won't show the authorship snippet;

Authors without strong external signals (links, G+ shares of their content...) won't have their photo shown either

Maybe, if an article as not a defined author, or if its author is not so authoritative, but have a comment by an authoritative author, than the authorship of the commenter will be put in evidence in the SERP's snippet of that article. That's could be the solution for what once Matt Cutts said that (paraphrasing) "if Danny Sullivan writes something in a web and he is not the author, and if you have done a query about Search Marketing, we want you to find and discover what he said, because he is an authority in that field".

Another preview I think could become real is that expansion of rich snippets. Right now, even if Google understand mostly every kind of Schema.org, the rich snippets are quite limited on the SERPs. Therefore, and also because of expansion of the Knowledge Graph and Answer Cards, I think that Google will start showing new and more genres of rich snippets.

I am actually really surprised there are so few profiles with "content marketing" in them. I think that prediction is going to be hit for sure. #2 would certainly be fascinating and scary at the same time!

I'm curious to hear a prediction about the effectiveness and adoption of Bing's Rewards program. I couldn't resist, personally. I switched over from Google on all my devices about two weeks ago and I'm up to about $10 in cash value already. I like that.

I think this year people will finally realize the serious gravity and potential Google+ has to replace Facebook as a marketing platform entirely. It won't replace Facebook by 2014, but it will become more prominent beginning this year, especially for smaller businesses that can't afford to pay for Facebook's sponsored posts.

I also think Pinterest will erupt in a new flurry of social activity, but I doubt it'll replace Twitter. Pinterest still needs to find ways to attract a male audience to the platform. So far, they haven't devised anything that could garner a significant male audience on the site.

Maybe they'll create an influencer program dedicated to a male-specific audience? Just a thought.

Great predictions Rand! However I strongly disagree with seeing "content marketing" on job boards. Will I see writing skills and that such on job resumes? Definitely, but content marketing is too big of a slice to be labeled as a job skill.